How to avoid too much detail in your Presentation

Too much presentation detail

One of the challenges all presenters face is having too much presentation detail, remembering that a presentation is usually a snapshot or summary of your ideas and as such is often a key stepping stone to the next step towards being hired by a potential client or doing more work for an existing client.

In this episode of the Better Presentations More Sales podcast I’m going to share with you three key things you can do to help ensure your presentation flows and doesn’t get bogged down in the detail. They are based on some recent 1:1 presentation coaching I’ve been doing with clients who faced this exact same challenge – they wanted originally to include far too much detail in their presentation. If you need help with your presentation check out my 1:1 presentation coaching service

Let’s not forget that with any presentation our key goals are to engage our audience,  educate them – which means sharing ideas and information they probably don’t know about or hadn’t thought about, enthuse them and to a degree entertain them.

So here are the three ways you can do that:

Firstly don’t start your presentation with detail and information about yourself, your company, its history, its awards, its great coffee machine etc… – in the vast majority of cases when you do a presentation or pitch the people you are presenting or pitching to already know lots about you because that is why there invited you to do your presentation or pitch so don’t lose momentum immediately by going over the stuff about you that they already know about you.

Secondly don’t put too much detail on your slides – it’s not the number of slides that causes death by PowerPoint it’s the content of those slides – so don’t write chapter and verse on each slide, don’t use complex diagrams, don’t combine images and words – make the slides simple – use them as a prompt not a script both for you and the audience.

Thirdly don’t let your narrative become too detailed – what I mean my narrative is the words you are speaking. In practice you won’t do this but when you go ‘live’ there is a danger that you will elaborate too much and spend too much time on each point, the result of which will be you will almost certainly overrun your time and lose momentum with your presentation.

Remember that I always advocate that when you practice your presentation you aim to do that in between 80 and 85% of your allocated time so on the day that gives you a bit of a buffer for narrative expansion, but not too much.

This is episode 223 of the Better Presentations More Sales podcast –  the previous 222 episodes are available on your usual podcast app or you can listen and download them via this link.

To find out how more about how I can help you deliver confident, impactful, memorable and action inducing presentations in 2022 please follow this link

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